Cluster

GeoSemantics / Letters to the Landscape: Audiovisual Recording from Parque Natural Aguas de Ramón, Chile / Macarena Lucía Urzúa Opazo & Mateo Goycolea Toro

By Macarena Lucía Urzúa Opazo & Mateo Goycolea Toro

Screen caption from Letters to the Landscape: Letters to the Landscape: Audiovisual Recording from Parque Natural Aguas de Ramón, Chile.

In the foothills of Santiago de Chile is Aguas de Ramón Natural Park. This place has been formed through erosion, which in its watery descent sculpts the rock and the materials found in its path. The transversal valley is thus composed by different streams that intersect with each other.

Our proposal is projected as an intervention and an audiovisual recording, where a soundscape under and above Ramon’s creek waters is combined together with the intention of exposing an erosion’s poetics, composed by rocks and roots in its contact with water. This primordial being, in its original state, under the current context of drought and mining extractivism, has its days counted. In this sense, our work is conceived as site specific.

Following Kathryn Yusoff (2010)1, we exhibit not only an aesthetic work that gives account of the environment where this intervention is located. Our piece exposes an ecological and political dimension, based on the changes experimented on the latest years in the park’s environment. Our audiovisual recording, plans to work directly with the materiality of stones, rocks and roots of Aguas de Ramón, referring to the archival dimension into which these matters become as a whole, together with the soil and the water. Making it possible to read them, not only as surfaces, but also as bodies and palimpsests. Our work is regarded both as an essay and as a positioned aesthetic practice: a reading of the soil, stones, and water through the means of observation. A recording of the water’s writing on the rock’s surfaces and of the sediment’s poetics, the texture and the projected changes on the environment, due to the advance of the desertification in the central zone of Chile, and in the Metropolitan region.2

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This is part of the cluster GeoSemantics. Read the other posts here. 

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Endnotes

  1. “Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change”.  Theory, Culture & Society 27 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), (2010): 73–99.
  2. We follow here the concept already worked and coined by Italian artist Guiseppe Penone, on his series, Essere fiume(Being the River): “the act of sculpting does not consist in revealing a hidden aspect of nature, but in retracing the stages of natural processes and in repeating them by means of traditional sculptural techniques and materials”. https://giuseppepenone.com/en/words/to-be-a-river

  • Macarena Lucía Urzúa Opazo

    Macarena Urzúa Opazo (Santiago, Chile, 1978) is a Researcher and Associate Professor at CIDOC / Literature Department, Universidad Finis Terrae, Santiago. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey. She has published articles regarding post dictatorship poetry in Chile, chronicles and cinema from the perspective of memory, space and landscape and on Avant-Garde networks in Latin America. She has co-authored ¿Quién le teme a la poesía? (2019); co-edited with Irene Depetris Chauvin, Beyond Nature. Practices and Spatial Configurations in Contemporary Latin American Culture (2019). Her current research explores the relationship between Spiritualism and the production of literature by women, affect theory and Women Rights on XIX and XX Century in Chile.

  • Mateo Goycolea Toro

    Mateo Goycolea Toro (Viña del Mar, 1973) holds a Licenciatura in Hispanic Literatures at Universidad de Chile and a M.A. in Discourse’s Analysis at Universidad de Buenos Aires. From these fields of study and disciplines, arise the interests on visual art and soundscapes that brought him to carry out trips and audiovisual cartographies such as a sound map of Robinson Crusoe’s Island. He is also a permanent collaborator of Factoría de Arte Santa Rosa and his work has appeared in several journals on a wide range of areas such as literature, philosophy and arts, in Mexico and Santiago de Chile. He currently works as a technical and curatorial assistant of Chilean photographer Julia Toro.